Floyd: Girl Scout cookie boycott is crazy; upsetting kids is cruel

If the witch-hunters and monster-shouters among us want to demonize Girl Scout cookies, there’s probably no point in trying to talk sense to them.

Once that kind of hysteria gets out of the barn, the stampede is on, shaking its horns and rolling its eyeballs and slinging long strings of slobber in its wake.

So if a noisy sect of cranks is truly determined to believe that Thin Mints came straight from Satan’s lunch box, well, that’s just more cookies for the rest of us.

Dark suspicion over the Girl Scouts, fueled by an extremist sliver of Waco-based conservatives, has been simmering for a while now. This time around, the epidemic of paranoia stems from one tweet and a single Facebook post.

Late last year, the national scouts organization’s official Twitter account cited a Huffington Post article about well-known and influential women of the year. The article named several women, including gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, who favors abortion rights.

The organization also posted a link on its Facebook page to a Washington Post article about seven “women who made a difference in 2013.” One of the seven was U.S. Secretary of Health Kathleen Sebelius, who has called for mandatory insurance coverage of contraceptives.

Out of the thousands of links-’n’-tweets the scouts organization issued, these two secondhand mentions were meant to reference lists of prominent and influential women.

These were not endorsements. No abortion-rights screeds. The Girl Scouts organization patiently if wearily reiterates that it doesn’t endorse candidates, doesn’t take a stand on abortion or contraception, does not involve itself in political issues.

Girl Scouts USA spokeswoman Kelly Parisi told the Associated Press that the articles were cited to highlight the year’s women newsmakers and “to encourage conversations about what it takes to be a female leader.” That’s it.

No matter. Pants-on-fire opportunists are using this nonissue to persuade the credulous that the Girl Scouts are actually a secret indoctrination conspiracy run by godless infidel feminists. They’re demanding a cookie boycott.

The angry woman talked right over her: “I’ll never give a nickel of my money to a pro-abortion group! Never!”

It was awful. The little girl and a younger sister, who was about 5 or 6, looked stricken.

“Mom?” asked the scout, anxious and worried, as if she had done something wrong. “What’s abortion?”

“I’m not telling you,” the mother said miserably. The woman, clearly anxious to keep broadcasting her views to everybody within a mile, did not budge.

At this point, I jumped in. “I want cookies!” I said with hearty enthusiasm. “Show me what kind you have!”

Back on familiar turf, the sweet Girl Scout went smoothly into her sales spiel: “These are good if you like peanut butter. Or if you like caramel, these are really good, too.”

I emptied my wallet to buy cookies and scraped up change from the bottom of my purse to buy another box for U.S. soldiers fighting overseas. I hovered over the cookie table until the cruel, crazy woman had stalked off to the parking lot.

It should be an elementary point of civilized behavior, but for anybody who needs a refresher, there is a correct answer to someone offering you something that, for whatever reason, you do not want to buy. It’s “No thank you.”

You do not engage in political arguments about contentious, adult topics with unsuspecting children, ever. Even if your poor tortured head is honeycombed with crazy Internet rumors and outright lies, you say, “No thanks” and walk on.

I was so angry that I (girlishly) cried a little bit in the car. I cried because that sweet girl thought she had said or done something wrong and because her mom was in the hopeless position of trying to talk sense to someone determined to believe nonsense and because the younger sister couldn’t understand why everybody was upset when they were supposed to be having fun selling cookies.

I cried because the one person in this awful little drama who ought to have been embarrassed was the one person who wasn’t.

Next time the demon-shouters get good and worked up, remember to ask yourself: Who’s the real demon here?

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